Guinea is back

The results from Guinea’s recent election have only recently emerged. With the opposition taking the president to court for fraud, which way is Guinea heading?

ExclusiveNovember 2013, by Alexandra Reza

Three roads leave Conakry, heading north, east and south. For Boké, you take the first left, due north, and follow the road for 200 kilometres; when you reach a small roundabout, turn right. The landscape is lush, but monotonous: orange earth and palms rising from damp shrubland, which quivers slightly, thick with heat and insects. Buildings appear occasionally along the side of the road. If you’re in a car and moving fast, these little towns flicker past so quickly that you feel you are looking through the slits of a zoetrope.

It was the first day of October 2012 and the daylight was fading as we took that left turn. We were going to Boké for Independence Day. Guinea was celebrating its 54th anniversary, and the president had chosen to hold the party there, in his mother’s hometown. The road was good, freshly smoothed in preparation for the festivities, and clear as we accelerated away from the city. The sky, though, was flashing; lightening quickened behind heavy clouds. When the deluge began shortly afterwards, the journey developed into a protracted slalom through the night, and a thick mist rose from the road as the rainwater hit the hot tarmac. There were no directions at the roundabout when we finally got there, hours later, just a huge sign slung across the road illuminated by headlights and the electric sky: “Guinea”, it read, “Is Back”.

The president said the same thing the next day. He raised his arm and shouted it, in English. The president looks younger than his 75 years, a smartly dressed, articulate man with a sense of humour that is often apparent in his public appearances. It was a slogan he’d used before, on his inauguration day in January 2011, to an assembled room of regional luminaries and foreign officials: a confident rallying call then; faintly absurd now, and strangely nostalgic with its bizarre register of a Hollywood blockbuster.

That was a year ago, and since then this sense of buoyancy has dissolved. It has not been a good year. In September, after months of anticipation and anxious predictions of ethnically driven violence, Guinea held legislative elections, its first since 2002.

The elections were intended as the final stage of a ‘democratic transition’ from military to democratic rule, which began in 2010. After decades of coup and counter coup, the first step was the successful election that year of veteran oppositionist Alpha Condé, who became Guinea’s first democratically chosen president with 52.52% of the vote in a second-round run-off. He promised the next step, the legislatives, would follow within six months.

Over the three years that followed, however, the elections were delayed five times, and Condé has ruled without an elected parliament. These delays stoked a mood of mutual distrust between the country’s main political players. In 2010, the other 47.48% went to Condé’s rival Cellou Dalein Diallo. His party denounced the result and many still feel that that the vote was stolen from them, not least because whilst Condé secured a second-round victory with a hotchpotch alliance of other parties, Diallo had won by far the biggest share of the vote in the first round: 44% to Condé’s 18%. The real tensions accompanying the legislatives this year derive from their being perceived — much like US midterms — as a dress rehearsal for the 2015 presidential election.

As such, every detail of the vote became a point of principle, and compromise scarce on both sides. In February, the opposition withdrew (again) from the whole process, demanding transparency. By the end of April, over fifty people had died in the protests that ensued and the prospects of finding consensus amid the political recriminations seemed non-existent; but somehow, by July, a UN-appointed mediator had succeeded in bringing both opposition and government to agree to a September election.

This was a real breakthrough — heavily lubricated by the donor community’s paternalistic reminders that no aid would come without elections — but the ‘democratic transition’ remained on a high wire. Only a few days before the vote, it was pushed back again amid opposition claims that it was being set up for a “masquerade”. Shortly afterwards, a French newspaper linked the opposition to attempts to foment a coup. The rhetorical stakes were set high.

Three years late, on the day they eventually passed off with no reported incident. But the results did not emerge for weeks, and in the end, the opposition have dismissed them. Shortly after the results emerged, they said they would sue the president in the Constitutional Court for fraud and demand that the whole vote be annulled. A few days later, a leading Guinean news outlet published a long feature on the country’s “curse” of electoral fraud, a curse, it claimed, that was “in the country’s DNA”.

There is indeed a weary sense of stagnation in the failure of the whole process to show that elections are an effective way of making political choices in Guinea. This feeling was palpable in so many conversations I have had in Conakry over the course of this year, palpable in the rolled eyes as Guineans watched with exasperation the pantomime put on by their political elites. This seems to be the most important thing to register: the disjunction between this feeling and the force of the Western insistence that elections must happen regardless; between Guineans’ exclamations in bars and in the back of cars that they can’t wait for all of this to be over so that they can get on with their lives (and so the government can actually do some governing) and the way the US, the EU, France and the UK have come to imagine that elections should be a principal arbiter of desert in their dealings with other countries.

In a previous life, Dr. Alpha Condé, or ‘le Professeur’ as he is often called in Conakry, taught public law at the Sorbonne in Paris. He has been in politics almost all his life, contesting the presidential elections in 1993 and 1998. In 1998, he had returned to a tense Guinea just ahead of the polls, and before the results were counted, was arrested in Guinea’s forest region near Côte D’Ivoire and Liberia, charged with illegally trying to cross the border. The charge was later changed to treason. He was sentenced to five years in prison by Lansana Conté’s regime, and although released early in 2001, remained prohibited from political activity.

Such was the rhythm of political existence for a time in Guinea: oppositionists knew the life they were choosing. The West wasn’t too bothered then. The US had cultivated close links with Conté and had already clocked the threat posed by his political opponents. A US cable sent fewer than 24 hours after Condé’s return to Conakry on 22 December 2008 demonstrates how closely he was being monitored: “His seemingly sudden arrival in the midst of rumors and controversy regarding the president’s health may be noteworthy... The government seems to view Condé with suspicion, and his name has been linked to possibly treasonous plots in the past.”

The attitude changed in 2010, when he was elected on a wave of optimism on a ticket for reform. Condé promised change, fast, from what he called the ‘communitarianism and bad governance’ of the past. He promised democracy, government for the people, and legislative elections within six months. After 50 years trying to make it to the top job, he declared that he would try “à mon petit niveau de devenir le Nelson Mandela de la Guinée” (try at his small level to become the Nelson Mandela of Guinea).

The West then flocked to commend the election of the new president, who has close links to the European left: Tony Blair’s African Governance Initiative advises him; François Holland allegedly tutoie’s his Socialist camarade in correspondence. It has carried on; in 2012 IMF awarded Guinea Heavily Indebted Poor Country status (which has resulted in $1.2 billion of debt relief), and this year Condé was the only African leader to be invited to attend the G8, doing the media rounds in London and presenting himself as a reformer committed to stamping out corruption in the extractive sector. (The fact that Guinea has some of the world’s largest unexploited mineral reserves might explain the G8’s otherwise surprising interest in schmoozing the president of one of the world’s poorest countries). Whilst the London camera bulbs flashed, the political air in Conakry crackled. For many at home, the fanfare was puzzling, given this president was ruling without a parliament in a country where poverty had increased under his watch. Exactly what was the West trying to say?

Indeed, the West has long been interested not only in Condé personally but in Guinea more generally, just as much for its politics as for its deep mines. Guinea has known only a few presidents since shuffling off France and De Gaulle in 1958, the first Sub-Saharan country to do so. Ahmed Sékou Touré was the first: Marxist independence leader, darling of the Pan-African movement in the 70s, giver of asylum to Malcolm X and Stokeley Carmichael, but intolerant of dissent at home. Thousands died at Touré’s notorious Camp Boiro, a concentration camp in Conakry reserved for opponents of the regime. Touré divided opinion to the last: repressive dictator, dangerous communist to the West; benevolent to his sympathisers and still admired by many for his contribution to independence. Along with Picasso, Brecht, Neruda, Mandela and others, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

When Touré died in 1984, Lansana Conté, a career soldier who had worked his way up through the Guinean army, seized power in a military coup. He too was repressive, paranoid, a corrupt mismanager. But the transition he began from military to civilian rule, along with economic and monetary reforms, ingratiated him with the IMF, the West and foreign investors. From years of allegiance to the Soviets, Guinea was returning to the fold. In November 1989, two months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in a headline that exemplifies the persistent lexis of hope that still colours so much of our media’s discussions of Africa, the New York Times declared: “New Hope for Guinea, a Land that Hope Forgot”. But Conté remained in power for almost two decades more, his rhetorical commitment to democracy only really an astute negotiating strategy with the West. He died slowly, his long illness resulting in confusion at home: riots in protest at his continued rule, and brutal crackdowns in response.

The next coup came only six hours after he finally died in December 2008, this time led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, who announced the news on television. The captain liked the television, and broadcast live programmes regularly during his regime. They were used to expose and humiliate officials involved in malpractice, corruption or narcotrafficking, and as platforms for his long and intimidatingly aggressive rants. Guineans called it Le Dadis Show.

Camara is now in Burkina Faso. He retired from public life a few months after a massacre in a Conakry stadium in September 2009. A peaceful protest in a Conakry stadium escalated and Camara’s Presidential Guard led the response. They murdered over 150 people, and raped more than a hundred women. Hundreds more were injured. The incident has become a national touchstone, and a trauma.

Sekouba Konaté, another soldier, took the helm and oversaw a transition to democratic rule, heavily lobbied for by the international community, culminating in the 2010 presidential election. Re-enter Condé. A civilian and an intellectual, in 2010 he won 52.52% of the votes in what was roundly proclaimed a historic moment: Guinea’s first (real) multiparty election.

But here we are, in 2013, with a late election that has been rejected by half of the political establishment. The show will go on. Both halves will continue to strategise, to dissemble, to be sanctimonious and indignant whilst their fellow citizens look on and wait for them to finish. Well, at least it’s not as bad as in Washington.

No Guinean I’ve spoken to has ever thought that the elections would change anything; they are deeply aware that an event that will tick boxes on donors’ checklists and make headlines in newspapers isn’t really an event at all; inconclusive, divisive, this debate will carry on for weeks and months. The president’s authority over decision-making will be much the same as it was before the poll; few Guineans expected anything else. The donors who pushed so hard will be able to wire home to say they scored a win, but Guineans at home will carry on as before, and will have to be more imaginative in trying to find meaningful drivers of real change.